| The Cirrus Cloud Hosting accounts are built on Linux servers which provide full root access. If you are a Linux geek and have one of these accounts, take 60 seconds to read this page. It will save you untold frustration. If you do not know what "root access" is, skip this article.
First, we will give you the key concept and second we will give you a few specific details.
Key Concept: The Cirrus account is a web and email hosting appliance that happens to be built on a Linux box. It is not a Linux box that happens to host web sites and email accounts.
Keep that key concept in mind and life will go very smoothly for you. The Plesk control panel manages many of the services on the box, including web hosting, email accounts, MySQL databases and users, firewall, etc. Use Plesk to do what it does; don't try to circumvent it or interfere with it or you will find yourself fighting for control. When you want to do something that Plesk does not "understand," log in as root and go wild.
Here are a few specifics to get you started:
- Administrative Access
- There are two ways to access your account and do admin things. 1) Log into the control panel as "admin" with the admin password. 2) Ssh in as the administrative user and run either su or sudo. If you change the Plesk admin password, it also changes the root Linux password to the same value. Although you can use su with the root password, you cannot ssh into the account as root using a password; this type of access is turned off in the sshd configuration file.
- Web Sites
- Use Plesk to add a "domain" for each site. If you gave us your domain name when you ordered your account, this domain is already set up for you. You may also find "subdomains" and domain "aliases" useful. If you really need to edit the Apache config file for a site, see the Plesk documentation for details on which files to edit and how to tell Plesk to rebuild the Apache configuration files.
- Email
- Use Plesk to create email users, aliases, etc. You have postfix and courier installed and running. Plesk does a good job of managing both. Plesk also understands qmail; you can switch if you want to. Plesk does not understand sendmail or dovecot.
- shell access
- Plesk users are intended to be used primarily for editing web sites, not for general shell stuff. Among the things that Plesk does, that is not right for normal shell users, is to make the user's home directory owned by an admin user and read-only. As such, a Plesk user cannot have things like .profile or .ssh/authorized_keys. If you want a Linux user with real shell access, log in as the administrative user, sudo or su, and run the Linux adduser command; don't try to use a Plesk user. You probably want to use a normal Linux user for any non-web application development.
- MySQL
- Use Plesk to create databases and users. If you do this, each user will (by default) have access to only its own databases, giving you a clean security model.
- Installing Software
- Feel free to run apt-get or aptitude and install software. If you are doing e-commerce and need to maintain PCI compliance, we encourage you to ask us before installing anything.
- System Monitoring
- Plesk includes its Watchdog module which will keep an eye on your server and send email to you when key events happen or thresholds are met. If you don't like those emails, turn off the Watchdog module.
- DNS
- We have pre-configured Plesk to notify our DNS servers when you add or delete domains. You can use ns1.namesecurity.net and ns2.namesecurity.net as your primary nameservers. You can also manage your DNS records within Plesk. Do not edit the zone files manually since Plesk will overwrite your changes. If you do not want to use the Plesk web interface, you can use the Plesk command line tools.
- Log Files
- Most log files are still in /var/log. Apache log files are in /var/www/vhosts/DOMAIN/statistics/ and are accessible only via the Plesk control panel or to root. The web site owner does not have access to the statistics directory.
If you are a command line guru, download a copy of the Plesk Command Line Interface. It describes the 50+ command line utilities in /opt/psa/bin. You will find about 75 more utilities in /opt/psa/admin/bin which are not documented but are pretty easy to figure out since most support a --help option.
When you have questions, please do not hesitate to ask us. We want you to have all the power with as little frustration as possible.
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